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Video: Former Guantanamo detainee speaks

LAHORE, Pakistan — Saad Iqbal Madni looks decades older than his 33 years when he shuffles into the room, head down and eyes averted.

"There are a lot of times I start to cry. I still feel like I am in Guantanamo," he says, his voice cracking and hands trembling. "I have memorized the torture. I wake up in the middle of the night screaming."

It has been two years since the Pakistani Islamic scholar left Guantanamo Bay. After six-and-a-half years of imprisonment as a suspected enemy combatant he was released without being convicted and without an explanation. According to accounts by Madni and others, his experience involved torture, extraordinary rendition across several continents and five years at the U.S. prison in Cuba.

Mohammed Burki, Madni's physician in Pakistan, describes his patient as a deeply troubled man who is "still far far away from being normal again."

While it is impossible to independently corroborate much of Madni's story, experts say it stands up to scrutiny.

"His account is so precise and so detailed and there are enough documents to back up everything he says," says Sultana Noon of Reprieve, a U.K.-based charity that represents prisoners who have been rendered and abused around the world.

Madni was part of wave of men scooped up in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. His story sheds further light on international counterterrorism efforts, when suspected terrorists were transported around the globe, held without trial and allegedly tortured at the hands of foreign intelligence agencies.

Some contend these practices continue.

"Anyone who is sporting a beard is a vulnerable target for the intelligence agencies to pick up," says Pakistani human rights activist Amina Masood. "We are talking about gross violations of human rights in this U.S. war on terror, disappearances, arrests, no courts to hear one's pleas."

"We are dealing with human beings here," she says.

Madni, who was employed to read the Koran during prayer times and religious holidays for the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation, says he was picked up by Indonesian authorities during a visit to Jakarta in 2002.

Shoe bomb
Madni says he was told by the officials who detained him that they were acting on CIA instructions after he told an Islamic group that he knew how to make a shoe bomb. Madni denies the charge, saying that nobody ever even questioned him about the alleged comment during his detention.

"A person from Egyptian intelligence come, kicked and grabbed me and threw me against the wall," he says. "That's when I got a perforated ear drum and started bleeding from my ear, nose and throat."

Madni identified his captors as Egyptian immediately from their accents. He is fluent in nine languages, including Arabic, which he believes made him suspect.

"They stripped me naked, beat me and kicked me," Madni told NBC News. "I was shackled from my neck to my feet and taken to a plane. They put me inside a wooden box, on top of the box is a plastic sheet. My legs were up on my chest and I had to stay like that for an 18-hour flight to Diego Garcia. They didn't allow me to go to the bathroom. They put me in diapers and said, 'your bathroom is with you'."

Diego Garcia is a British territory used by the U.S. military.

Madni says he kept track of the passage of time because he recited the Koran by heart. Anyone who reads the Muslim holy book professionally knows exactly how long it takes to recite each verse.

"A man from military intelligence introduced himself as Ron," he told NBC News. "He said, 'We did a mistake about you but we can't release you, we have to take you to Guantanamo and from there you will be released.'"

Madni says he was kept in Bagram for one year where he was repeatedly tortured and denied any visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which works to protect victims of armed conflict around the world.

On March 23, 2003, almost two years after he was picked up in Jakarta, Madni arrived at Guantanamo Bay.

"They put me in frequent flyer status for six months. That means no sleep. The guards came to wake me up every ten minutes. Every two hours they make me walk from camp to camp in shackles from my neck to my feet," he says. "I was in terrible pain from my ear, which was infected and bleeding. They ... wrote 'f*** you' inside the Koran and flushed pages from it down the toilet."

Madni breaks down as he recalls what was perhaps his most difficult time.

"They put me in Delta Block in a six-by-four refrigerator with just my underwear for six months. I lost my hearing and when they finally started to give me IV medication, I noticed that the labels had expired dates," he alleges. "They would keep me for 15 hours in the interrogation room with no bathroom, I had to pee and number two on myself."

After 192 days in Guantanamo, Madni tried to hang himself with a bed sheet. He later went on a hunger strike for a year and a half.

Madni also claims he was denied medical treatment for his infected eardrum. The guards told him he would be treated only after he confessed to knowing Osama bin Laden, Madni says.

Prison records later revealed that the ear infection had spread dangerously close to his brain, Burki, his doctor says.

House arrest
The International Committee of the Red Cross paid for Madni's treatment for six months after he was released.

Back home in Pakistan Madni's ordeal is still not over. He remains under house arrest and needs permission from security officials to leave home and meet with people, even with his own sister.

Madni's treatment at the hands of Pakistani authorities is not unusual, Reprieve's Noon says.

"Most Gitmo detainees are kept in jail or under house arrest when they are repatriated because the government doesn't want to be embarrassed in the media," she says.

Reprieve is suing the Pakistani government on behalf of seven Pakistani prisoners who are in detention in Afghanistan's Bagram. The charity sued the government for illegal rendition and for violating the men's human and constitutional rights.

The ex-detainees, Britons or British residents, were claiming damages from the government over allegations that they were mistreated during their detention abroad with the knowledge and in some cases the complicity of British security services.

Madni was released without a conviction after his lawyer Richard Cys of Davis Wright Tremaine took up the case pro bono in the U.S. courts.

"We are pleased that he was released from his imprisonment," Cys said in a written response to an interview request from NBC News.

Guantanamo Bay prison is still holding 173 detainees, according to Reprieve.

'My family won't forget'
President Barack Obama, desperate to keep his campaign promise to reduce the prison population and eventually close the facility, has strong-armed allies to take former prisoners in, according to secret diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.

In Pakistan, Asma Jehanghir, president of the Supreme Court Bar Association and a human rights lawyer, promised to fight Madni's case in the Pakistani courts in order to lift his house arrest.

But Obama closing Guantanamo and the government clearing his name won't erase the last eight years of Madni's life.

"What they did to me me and my family won't forget for 100 years," Madni says. "There are a lot of people like me that never did anything and were in Guantanamo Bay."

A U.S. military guard arrives for work at Camp Delta in the Guantanamo Bay detention center on March 30, 2010. Two days after his inauguration in January 2009, President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the facility in one year and review each detainee’s case individually, but he has missed the deadline by months and has struggled to transfer, try or release the remaining detainees. (These pictures have been reviewed by the U.S. military.)
(John Moore / Getty Images)
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Detainees prepare to eat lunch at Camp 6 in the Guantanamo Bay detention center on March 30, 2010. The U.S. military currently holds 183 detainees at Guantanamo, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The detention center has held nearly 780 detainees in an assortment of camps that were built to accommodate different levels of security. In Camp 6, detainees spend at least 22 hours a day in single-occupancy cells.
(John Moore / Getty Images)
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In this picture, a detainee stands in Guantanamo’s Camp 6, his face obscured by a wire fence. There are strict rules on the publication of photographs of detainees – any distinguishing features or clear pictures of detainees’ faces are not allowed past Guantanamo’s gates.
(John Moore / Getty Images)
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A detainee reads a magazine in the library at Camp 6. One of the obstacles President Obama faces in shutting down the detention facility is that Congress has blocked funding for a plan that would transfer some detainees to a prison in the United States.
(John Moore / Getty Images)
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The Department of Justice is currently reviewing each detainee’s case individually and categorizing them into three groups: those who face trial, those who will be transferred to detention facilities in other countries, and those who are deemed a danger but cannot released or tried because of sensitive evidence – and must continue to be held. There are 48 detainees in this category. Here, detainees prepare to eat lunch at Camp 6.
(John Moore / Getty Images)
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In this photo, a detainee attends a class in "life skills" inside Camp 6. In November 2009, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other Sept. 11 suspects would be prosecuted in a federal court in New York City, setting off a heated debate that put the White House on the defense and has forced it to reconsider the plan. The Obama administration has also designated six detainees for trial by military tribunal, including Canadian Omar Khadr, whose trial will be the first at Guantanamo during the Obama presidency.
(Brennan Linsley / AP)
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A U.S. Navy guard prepares to escort a detainee after a "life skills" class in Camp 6. Meantime, the war crimes tribunal convened in Guantanamo on April 28, 2010, to decide what evidence can be used against Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was just 15 when he was detained in Afghanistan in 2002.
(John Moore / Getty Images)
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Congressional Republicans and some Democrats oppose the plan to prosecute detainees in federal courts because that would give suspects full U.S. legal rights and could lead to the release of dangerous terrorists. Supporters, however, say military courts unfairly limit defendants’ rights and contend that federal courts are just as capable of bringing suspects to justice. In this photo, U.S. Army guards are briefed at the Guantanamo Bay detention center on March 30, 2010.
(John Moore / Getty Images)
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A U.S. Army soldier patrols past a guard tower at Camp Delta. A final difficulty in closing the detention facility is skepticism about how well some countries would monitor and rehabilitate detainees transferred there – and whether they would be at risk of being recruited into terror networks. Yemen, in particular, is under scrutiny after the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is believed to have been trained by al-Qaida in Yemen. The Obama administration has since suspended all transfers to Yemen.
(John Moore / Getty Images)
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Editor's note:
This image contains graphic content that some viewers may find disturbing.